The ability to conduct high-speed data communications between remotely separated data processing systems and associated subsystems has become a requirement of a variety of industries and applications, such as business, educational, medical, financial and personal computer uses. Moreover, it can be expected that current and future applications of such communications will continue to engender more such systems and services. Currently available digital subscriber line (DSL) technology provides for the delivery of relatively high data bandwidth digital communication services, selected in accordance with type and length of data transport medium, schemes for encoding and decoding data, and transmission rate, which will vary depending upon customer requirements.
At the low end of the bandwidth usage scale, a T1 data rate will usually suffice, whereas high data transport density and bandwidth customers (such as in large scale industrial and financial institution applications) may require a much higher bandwidth, such as a T3 system. In a large number of applications, however, the customer's needs fall somewhere in between. Because of the very substantial increase in cost associated with upgrading to very high bandwidth (T3) service, service providers now offer a form of ‘fractional’ T3 service, in which the data transport capabilities of a plurality of T1 data lines are used, by employing an inverse multiplexing scheme known in the communications industry as Inverse Multiplexing for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (or ATM/IMA). Unfortunately, this particular ATM transport mechanism suffers from a relatively high overhead penalty (on the order of eleven, and most of its current implementations have relatively high royalties attached to them.